Robert Greene: How to use the 48 Laws of Power to get what you want in business

Transcript from https://podmenti.com/t/bd1fb4b4812651fa

One of the best parts about this is there's so many levels to this. So when I tweeted this quote out, Darmesh, who's the s you know
co founder of a twenty thirty billion dollar company, retweeted and says this is exactly what I needed to hear today.
I feel like I can rule the world, I know I could be what I want to
I put my all in it like my day's all on a roll, less travel never. Man, I am so excited to talk to you. I've read all your books.
And I have always thought that
Instead of whatever they're teaching at universities, I was like, Man, I wish I could just do a four year degree on like four or six of these Robert Green books because they're amazing. Wow. And in particular, mastery. It absolutely changed my life. I read that when I was twenty
twenty two years old, about twelve years ago, eleven years ago, it totally changed my life. It changed my life because
I thought that being a generalist was the way to go.
But according to the book mastery, it it was not.
Yeah.
Well, you know, um we live in these fantastic times with so much
technological power. It's just almost incredible. You know, I mean yesterday I was
working on my new book and I
Had a question.
And I just did an AI search and it's just insane what it can do for you.
But the problem is the human brain is what it is.
It isn't a piece of technology that that
somebody developed recently. It's something that has
hundreds thousands of years of development and it has a certain way that it operates and a certain grain to it.
And you wanna go with that grain and you wanna be excited by learning and you wanna make connections in the brain between diff different things.
And you wanna be able to focus so deeply on something.
I like to think of the brain as this kind of landscape.
And it can be rich and it can be one where all these different plants are emerging, or it can be like a wasteland.
And if you learn different things and you focus very deeply
And you're excited by what you're learning.
then all of these connections will start happening in the brain.
And so if you go through that apprenticeship
Focused and developing real skills and whatever that is.
By the time you finish your apprenticeship, let's say you're thirty years old.
You'll be set. You'll be able to create your own business. You'll be very creative. You will laid
groundwork for something really important to happen.
But if you're distracted, if you're focusing on a hundred different things, that's not how the human brain functions.
We function when we go deep into something, when we bore deep.
Deep, deep, deep, deep into a subject.
I know when I'm writing a book
Which I'm doing right now.
The first attempt that I make at something is very superficial. It's not interesting. You wouldn't believe how bad my writing is on the first go.
But I go deep.
deep deep into what I'm thinking. I cross it out. I do something else. I edit it.
But the tenth time I go into it, something interesting is happening.
So when you focus deeply on something
Ideas will come to you and sometimes those ideas will be brilliant.
How many books do you read um to write one book? So for mastery, how many books did you consume to write that one? Or four eight laws of power.

Hard to estimate, but uh it's somewhere around three hundred.
Some uh could be upwards of that.
And
You know, sometimes
If a book is is bad, and believe me, I go I read a lot of bad books
I kind of skimmed them.
You know, oh this passage is really sucks or this chapter is meaningless. I'll kind of float through it.
But if a book is really good
And you know, I can there are some books that are incredible. I'd say maybe about
A fifth of them reach that level.
I'll focus very deeply, I'll even reread it several times.
It's probably why my health suffered and why I had a stroke is because
I read too many books, I do too much research.
But I wanna get at the reality of what I'm writing about. I don't wanna be
Superficial'cause
So many books out there.
At least for me.
don't really go deep enough into the subject. They're kind of skimming along the surfaces.
So y y Sam was talking about mastery and you have this concept of
People finding their life.
Life task. Life task.
And I think that's great. Uh, but I know a lot of people who are maybe in their thirties or forties who don't know that that is and maybe they feel like it's
Too late or they're stuck or don't know where to start. Um, can you you know, what's the sort of
Pocket book.
guidance you have for somebody like that who's looking for who who's trying to figure out what that is, and what are the tools they could use to figure out that life task.
Well it's a question I get all the time and it's an extremely important question.
The idea that I have is that
When you were born, your your DNA, there's something completely unique about you. Genetically, there's never gonna be anyone in the past or the future who will be like you.
Your parents who raised you there also unique.
So you are a unique individual. You were so at birth.
Right.
And when you were very young.
Two, three, four years old.
You're attracted to certain things naturally. I call them primal inclinations.
Things that you loved very deeply, that you were drawn to, that you were attracted to.
I tell the story in the book.
Of Steve Jobs. He's seven years old. He's walking with his father in Sunnyvale, California, where he grew up.
And he passes by
An electronic shop.
And he's just fascinated by these objects in the window.
the design of them and how beautiful they are.
It was at that moment that he became
sort of fell in love with technology, not just as technology as as a machine, but as the design of it, because he was a brilliant designer.
So I'm saying you had those moments when you were five or six years old, but your problem is
When you were 18 or 19 or 20, you took a wrong path.
You listen to other people, you didn't listen to yourself.
You listen to your parents who said
Robert, you should go to law school. And this is what you know, some of what my own parents told me. You need to go to business school, you need to go become a doctor, you need to get something practical and make a living.
And you're alienated from that deep, deep love of something that you had when you were four or five years old, or six years old, or whatever it is.
And then you go down a wrong path.
So
The way is to get back onto that path.
And the way is to reconnect with who you are, with what you truly love and what your interests are. And there's a process for that, and I can go into it and I've
consulted with many people on this thing.
But the problem is
You're so in tune with what other people are telling you. You're not listening to yourself. You don't know what makes you unique.
And if you look at all of the
really successful people in this world. People
The great entrepreneurs or in any field.
They're one of a kind.
Right?
There's nobody else like it.
A a Kobe Bryant out there.
You know.
God rest his soul my favorite basketball player.
They're one of a kind, okay?
So you lost that somehow.
And
When you're in your thirties
You can get back to it.
But what you need to do is you need to be practical in life.
You can't just suddenly start all over and go.
I've been learning these skills. I went into law school and and I'm not happy with it. You can't now turn around and say,
Well, I'm gonna be a poet.
Or I'm gonna s be a rock star.
You've already learned skills.
You have to build on what you have and take it in a direction towards something that you really, really love.
Right, you need to be practical and you may have to compromise a little bit.
But when you're in your thirties, you can still do it and because you're you're young enough and your mind is flexible.
As you get older, you get rigid, you get set in your ways, and it becomes harder and harder and harder to do this process.
When you're in your forties.
It's still possible because it's it's getting harder. When you're in your fifties
It's getting almost
very, very difficult. So the real lesson for people out there is if you're
Twenty years old.
Do not go on that wrong path because it gets very difficult later in life to adjust.
But if you're in your thirties
You have to reassess yourself.
You have to get a journal.
And every day you have to write down things.
About what really excites you in life. What it was
When you open a book and you read about something and you go, Wow.
That just attracts me.
I know personally
Whenever I see an article
Or a story.
About early humans and how we developed.
thirty, forty, sixty thousand years ago.
I I can't believe it. I'm so excited. I can't bel
We were actually like that and look who we are now.
You have subjects like that, but you've just become alienated from yourself. You're not listening to yourself. You're not listening to that voice in your head.
And you need to find your way back.
Alright, I read a ton. I would say almost a book a week. And the reason I read so much is because my philosophy towards reading is I want to see what worked for the winners that I love and what strategies they use, and then I wanna see
What mistakes w uh did they all make? What were the common flaws that they all had? And I just want to avoid that.
And so HubSpot asked me to put together a list of the books that have changed my life so far in two thousand twenty five. And I did that. And so I listed out seven books that made a meaningful difference in my life, and I explained
What the differences that they had on me or what
actions I took because of the book.
And then also I list it out my very particular ways of reading because I'm
pretty strategic about how I read and how I read so much and how I remember what I read and things like that. And so I put this together in a very simple guide. It's seven books that had a huge impact on my life.
And you can scan the QR code below if you want to read it. Or there's a link. You guys know what to do. There's a link in the description. Just go ahead and click it and you'll see the guide that I made. So it's the seven books that had a massive
change in my life this year so far.
And then also
how I'm able to read so much. So check it out below.
You know, I um I'm only saying this to give you context, um, Robert, but
M millions of people listen to this podcast and sometimes they look up to Sean and I because we've done some interesting things in the business world. Yes. And I think sometimes they look down on us too. Sometimes they look up to us. A lot of times they look down at us, uh though. And uh and I can't speak for Sean.
But even, you know, we're fortunate to have people look up to us and even I am sometimes like, I still don't know what my life's task is. I still have doubts. And I think that you said something, you're like, you have to listen to yourself and like maybe yourself is yelling at you, but so is everything else. And so it's kind of hard to hear.
Can you actually walk me through you said you consult with people and the interesting thing about being a a historian like you is like very billionaires, I imagine they're like
Be my Oracle, tell you what to do. What questions do you ask to journal?
Uh or what is like your seven day exercises that you do with someone who's hiring you to help?
you find or you know, hiring you to give them their life's
Task or help them find it.
Okay, well, you know, as I as you as you point out, the problem is
In this era of social media.
We have so much information coming at us.
That we're confused and we're distracted, right? There's all this noise, this static going on in your brain.
You're hearing what people are having for lunch, you're hearing about this outrage, this problem.
You don't have a
You're not able to focus.
So the main thing here is you gotta really, really go into yourself. You gotta cut out all that crap. You're taking it seriously.
Because a lot of people who come to me
I can tell right away.
They're not serious about it.
They kind of like, well, I'm not really happy. Maybe Robert can help me figure it out. No dammit, you have to figure it out. It's not up to me. You're not taking it seriously. You're playing a game.
You kind of have dreams and you wish.
No, you gotta take this seriously. Your life is at stake.
Time is short, you know, you could die tomorrow.
Life is shorter than you think.
So you don't have time to waste.
So take this thing seriously. That's the number one thing I tell people.
And what take it seriously means is
It requires time.
All right.
You're gonna carve out
Let's say a week.
of real focus and I think it could do it longer than that. But let's just say
in in your scenario, a week of clear focus, all right?
You're gonna get a journal.
A book or a computer if you do it on a computer, I recommend an actual book.
Because the brain and the hand
There's a there's a process, there's a magic goes on when you handwrite something. I'm not asking you to handwrite everything, but in this case, writing in a journal is the best idea, I think.
Okay. So you're gonna start writing in a journal. You can even sometimes voice recorder because I do that.
too as well if that's something you prefer.
Um, but I don't want you to be on the screen all the time, okay? I want you to be f
Really listening to yourself deeply.
Okay, so you're writing things down.
You're gonna start writing
You're gonna begin by saying these are the things that I love.
And these are the things that I hate. And you can put you can put it in in you can divide the page in half and and do that if you want.
So to give you an example
Things that you hate and dislike
are a very important part of figuring out your life's task.
Now personally
I didn't figure out what I was really meant to do.
Which is writing these books until I was about thirty eight years old.
Okay.
I was kind of lost.
And I was kind of wandering.
But the one thing I knew and uh and I've known
At a very early age is
I hate working for other people.
I hate working for other people. I hate the politics.
I hate the egos.
I'm I like to control things.
So I need I need to be somebody who works for myself.
Right. I can't work for other people.
I'm really bad at it. I never held a job.
For longer than ten or eleven months in my entire life. I was always
Dissatisfied quid and whatever. Okay.
So
No what you hate.
is very important for knowing what you love.
All right.
So you cut things out. You cut all the stuff out that you don't want to do.
You you're not interested in math, you're not interested in numbers.
You're more of an ID person. I don't know what it is, but you're gonna write down the things that you love, the things that you hate.
In the present moment.
Right. And you can do
Yeah.
What this is really about, Sam, is you're connecting with yourself.
Right? Because you're not connected to yourself. And that's the number one problem people have in this world.
They're listening to other people, they're imitating other people.
Oh, this is a cool person. I wanna be like him or her.
No, you gotta be yourself.
You're not connected to yourself. So this journaling process
It's gonna take you through several days.
Of reconnecting with who you are.
The other thing that you need to do is you need to go into your childhood, into your early years.
So we begin by looking at the present moment.
I hate working for other people.
I love
this kind of subject or this kind of thing in in the world.
Now I want you to go deep into your childhood.
I compare it to being like an archaeologist, you're making a dig.
Right.
It's you're not going back millions of years, you're going back to when you were four or five years old.
And I want you to'cause in those the early years
You were open to the world. You were really open. We with we get older we get really closed.
Certain things excited you in a way that you can't
Even
Recall.
It's not the same to you now.
Right? It d didn't have to do with words, it had to do with feelings.
So I tell the story I told you like Steve Jobs.
There's the story of Tiger Woods with his father in the garage. He's like two years old, I don't know, something like that. His father is hitting golf balls in the garage. You know, there's one of those little plastic balls against the against the wall.
And Tiger's sitting there in his baby chair and he's getting so excited. He's kicking his legs Oh my God, this is incredible.
Right then and there.
He had discovered his life's task, basically.
It wasn't like an intellectual process. It wasn't well
I'm two years old. Golf is really interesting and I'm gonna study it.
It was in his heart, it was something deep, you can't put it into words.
Right.
You had that moment.
It's almost pre-verbal, but something really, really excited you.
For me when I was a child
It was language and words. I was obsessed with la with words.
And books and and just
The magic
Of a word itself.
It like boggled my mind, how incredible.
You had those moments.
Whatever it was.
So we're going back into your childhood and we're digging and we're digging and we're digging.
You also have to cut out all of the other voices.
Part of the journaling is
I listened to what my friends were telling me.
I listened to what my parents were telling me.
Cut all that shit out and listen to yourself.
That's pretty great. I do have one kind of
Follow up or I don't know.
C clarifying question. So I have a
five year old today.
And I think about like what I observe in her.
But I would guess that
You know, most of the things that she really loves are pretty common, like
She lo like since she's in a baby, like if music comes on, she loves to dance. My one year old old is the same way.
My four year old is the same way. Um
Does that mean she's gonna be a dancer, right? Like they love to play video games on the iPad. Does that mean they're gonna be a gamer or a game designer? Like there's some things that are just so common. Everyone loves they love cookies, they love ice cream. Does that mean they're gonna be Ben and Jerry's? Like
Is there another angle to it which is like
You know, you're sort of
uniquely into it or um
Maybe to others are not you have to look for the things that others are not into.
How do you differentiate just like
common dopamine things we all like versus my life's task.
Well, it's a great question. Um
I like to refer people to this book by Howard Gardner called Five Frames of
Intelligence, I think. I'm sorry, I might not have the title exactly right.
But the point of this book is
That there are five kinds of intelligent.
And some of it has to do with math and patterns.
Some of it has to do with words.
Some of it is kinetic, it's just the body and moving the body. Some of it is social, okay?
Some of it involves music and or or visual things.
he studied this very deeply and he asserts that every human being
has one of these intelligences that stands out that kind of dominates their brain.
So
It's not
It's not a trivial thing of
You know, I like to play video games or I like to eat cookies.
It's something more deep, it's something more primal.
It's about a certain direction that your brain heads in.
So with your y young daughter
It's
Is she into sort of just
Physical things.
Or does she have some kind of intellectual interest that draws her that's very exciting?
Okay.
So you know, all children like to move around and jump around and run around, et cetera. That doesn't mean that they're gonna be a an athlete.
I understand your question.
But
Some people are like that. Some people that is their dominant interest.
Right.
And you can see
That as I said, by looking at the negative. They're not into they're not into math. They're not into words. They're just into moving around.
And
Maybe at four it's hard to see that, but by the time there's seven or eight, it becomes very clear.
But what are their mind, their brain attracted to?
Okay.
And the problem with parenting is
You're projecting onto your child.
What you like, what your interests are, who you are.
You're not understanding that they're an individual. Your daughter is unique. She's something she's not you. She has your genetics.
But she's a girl, she's different gender, she has a different experience from you.
Right? She also has the genes of her mother.
You're projecting onto her.
So imagine that you're in her skin and seeing her the worm from her point of view.
And you can see the things that she doesn't like that she hates.
But what is her mind?
Drawn to
I'm
pretty sure that if you focused on it deeply, you could see some the outlines of what that is.
But the main thing you want to do is
You want to let your child discover that for yourself.
You don't want to push them in a direction that you think is better for them.
You want
To let them discover it for themselves.
And when you see it.
Which you will with your daughter, maybe it'll happen soon or maybe in a couple of years.
You want to encourage them.
Right.
Even if it's something that you think isn't good for them that oh you can't make a living at that.
You want to encourage them because you want children
Mm.
You be excited by learning.
If you turn your your five year old off from learning
For whatever reason.
Man, you're a bad parent.
I'm sorry to say
That's the number one thing. They've gotta be excited by something.
What is that thing that they're drawn to?
I believe there you if you went deeply into it, you could almost figure it out right now. You know, we could even talk about it, but I think that's
Right.
It reminds me of one thing, Sam. I wanna I wanna hear your question about the uh maybe one of his other concepts or books, but just reminds me of
Uh Warren Buffett has said
The best thing his dad ever taught him.
was the c was the importance of an inner scorecard.
So he says most people live with an outer scorecard and the thought experiment he gives is like, you know, would you rather
be the uh you know, whether his uh he the funny example he gives is would you rather be the world's
best lover, but everybody thinks you're the worst.
Or the world's worst lover, but everybody thinks you're the best. And that the your answer to that, he says the same thing about investing. Well, should I be the best if I was the best investor, but everybody thought I was the worst, would that be better?
Or if I was the worst investor, but everybody thought I was the best, would that be better?
What's the answer?
Well, he's he's like the m you know, for him, he attributes the most of his success to the fact that he has a very strong inner scorecard. I see. That like he's not immune to the idea of an outer scorecard that like other you know, caring what other people think of him.
However
He listens to himself first and foremost, and he carries an inner scorecard and he marks his actions.
And his choices in his life.
On
what he thought would be the right choice and what he thinks is a good life for him, which is totally different than what other people have, but
He's he says that that's the importance of having an i a strong inner scorecard. Yeah, I mean this isn't rocket science. This is like very basic
It's very basic human psychology.
Hey, let's take a quick break. You know, HubSpot helped Tumblr solve a big problem. Uh Tumblr needed to move fast. They were trying to produce trending content.
But their marketing department was stuck waiting on engineers to code every single email campaign.
But now.
They use Subspot's customer platform to email real time trending content.
To millions of users in just seconds.
And the result
was huge. Three times more engagement and double the content creation.
If you wanna move faster like Tumblr, visit hubspot.com.
Alright, back to the show.
I wanna ask you about silence.
You're um I think there's two reasons why I love your book.
Or all of your books.
I think the first takeaway is that it's about
human nature and human nature generally doesn't change.
Uh that's the point of it.
And so you kinda like give a blue blueprint for that. But the second thing is that
Particularly with the four eight laws of power.
The most important thing is self control.
Which is quite challenging.
And in particular, you write a lot and you talk a lot about silence and you're like
It's actually better to say as least as possible because when you talk too much you make yourself look stup stupid or you reveal your true intentions, which you don't always want to do. With social media and like particularly Sean and I's j job, it's like very easy to talk too much or to talk a lot.
Is there any examples of you think that
Someone who's popular or someone who's doing a really good job of
sort of a master class on how to use silence to their advantage.
I think of uh various musicians like a Michael Jackson or a Beyonce.
I mean Michael Jackson is sort of before the ear obviously of social media.
But he was somebody who knew
that occasionally he had to withdraw completely from the public eye.
And um the thing about Michael Jackson was he was very c clever and very kind of
Savvy about things.
And he
Um actually had the forty eight laws of power.
And um
When he died his estate
had the book and they auctioned it, somebody bought it for three hundred thousand dollars.
But if you look on it,
He annotated everything in there, right?
He wrote on the margins, et cetera.
But the thing that Michael Jacks understood before he even read the book
was the importance of disappearing.
So he understood the public very well in the magic of attention.
Right,'cause attention is the whole game when you're a celebrity.
And he understood that when you're too present, then people know you too well, they take you for granted.
So he would disappear for several years.
in between albums nobody knew what he was doing and it made everybody talk about him, made everybody fantasize about him, made everybody wonder what's the next trick that Michael Jackson's gonna perform.
Beyonce will do the same thing.
You know?
I was once asked by um
By a famous female rapper named Saweetie.
She we were having dinner and she asked me the same question, like
I I'm social media.
How do I disappear? If I disappear
Well it's not a matter that like you you gone for for several months.
But you don't have to post every day.
You have to create some mystery around you.
And even if you do post
You're not so obvious.
You know say exactly who you are, exactly what you had for breakfast, exactly the clothes that you're wearing.
You create some mystery around you.
That is a form of silence. That is a form of disappearing.
Because the whole point is
If people know exactly who you are.
There's no fantasy element in it anymore. And they're gonna get bored with you and they're gonna turn their attention.
To somebody else who seems interesting for the moment.
Right.
So you can be too present, you could be too in in in people's face. They know everything about you and they start to take you for granted. You're too familiar.
So if you're in the public eye.
You have to shake things up.
People have to go
I thought
That you were like this, Sam.
But now I'm getting this idea that maybe I didn't know who you are.
You can do that.
by disappearing for a week or so and then people are wondering what happened to Sam, why isn't he posting? Or you can do it.
By putting things on social media to kind of scramble people's expectations of you, scramble what people think of you.
I know in in in my line of work
If I wrote the same book, if I did the Forty Eight Lost Power Part Two for my second book.
It would probably have some success. People would be interested in it.
But it starts to get predictable.
Right.
So I make sure every new book that I do is different.
goes off in a different direction. So people can't take me for granted. So people don't know what I'm gonna do next.
Giving them guessing as to what the next subject is.
going off in a new direction and challenging them.
is part of the game.
So if you become too predictable.
People are gonna tune you out and they're gonna move on to somebody else.
And so
Changing the scrambling their expectations is a form of silence is creating mystery because that's what this is all about.
Sean, do you ever think about this stuff?
I thought of it when uh Sam said something kind of amazing to me.
Uh he said.
You know, we're doing this podcast.
And
Not long ago, a couple of years ago, we were in a group chat where a bunch of us who had ten thousand followers were like, you know, we wanna get to a hundred thousand. Let's make it and we called it the hundred thousand club and we we all
Start posting and and we got there.
And he said something like um
My goal is by the time I'm forty
To be off the internet.
Like just d just sort of disappear from the internet. Uh I really never heard I I've only ever heard of people
saying I want to g become more famous. Yeah. Um, not uh and and more uh more digital and have a bigger platform and a bigger audience and more followers.
And it was the first time I'd heard somebody in my friend group say the exact opposite.
Like the goal is to push delete when I turn forty. I almost didn't believe it. In fact, I still only half believe it.
Um
And but I loved it.
Exactly.
And I and I think Sam also does a good job of the scramble.
He'll you know, on one hand he's he'll be a CEO of a media company and then he'll post a video of himself skateboarding.
And like or dunking. I'm like, oh you could I didn't even know you're athletic. And you and many times on this podcast, in the last five years of this podcast, he's come on and be like,
I've decided I'm a fitness influencer now. And then he comes back and changes it. And he's like, I'm all about fashion and style. And I'm like, dude.
No offense, but you're not the first guy I think of when it comes to fashion. But this idea and and he'll
Annoyingly quote you, Robert.
Whatever, rule number seven, reinvent yourself. I told him I was picking up the piano this year. He's like, I love it, reinvent yourself. And I was like, that's a much
Yeah, grander.
you know, uh frame for what I'm doing, but I appreciate that. I like that. I like go I do like going back to the bottom of the mountain.
And so
Um when you're saying this about silence or about disappearing
You know, I don't think there's a lot of that, which makes it I think even more valuable. It's more rare, it's more different. Um, but I also think it comes with a season. Like you need a s almost a season of loudness to get people to care. If you just
If you're nobody and you disappear, then you never were anybody, right? Like but if you have a season of loudness and then it's followed by a season of silence.
That seems more optimal. That's what I wrote in my I'm as you can see, I'm taking notes while we do this.
That's what I wrote on there is this this is seasonal.
And I think I have
been one track minded about too many things where it's like, this is good, therefore always do this.
And actually
Um you do need different seasons and how you're how you're gonna operate. And that combination is what's more powerful. Yeah. No, I couldn't agree with you more. Yeah.
So so what is Sam gonna do when he turns forty then?
Uh that's a great question. But uh the reason I said that was uh how old are you now?
I'm thirty six. I just turned thirty six.
The reason I said that was because I think that I I do believe in reinventing yourself. I go I'm not
You know, blowing smoke. I like your your work has had a profound impact on me. But I I I believe in reventing yourself. But I also believe that wherever your life ends and wherever you are, like the goal is to file you know, find your life's purpose and go after it. But there's like these weird pivots to get there. It's not a straight line.
And I believe in like these forcing forcing functions make you pivot.
to kind of find where you're supposed to be.
So so where will that pivot lead you?
When you get off the internet.
You don't know. You're gonna discover when it happens. You're open to it.
You just know that at some point you want something else.
Yeah, I I I don't know, but I think that like
I think that I'm a pr I'm a gregarious person. I talk a lot.
And I actually think that um
I think that
I think that for the last twenty years since the internet has been around, you know, you you hear the A word.
Authenticity thrown around thrown around a lot.
Yeah. And I actually think that
based off of your works and but and reading history
Being authentic is like that's actually kind of a new thing. Like people that's a relatively new idea to be authentic because now you can just film yourself on a camera.
And you've been told to be authentic.
But people
The most powerful people on earth they uh they're not really authentic, they wear masks.
And they're acting.
And
I think that like an interesting takeaway from your book is to
understand w what outcome you want and which mask you need to wear. And I actually think that being authentic is over glamorized and actually is actually ineffective.
When you want your
And I actually think that it's
For some reason we think being authentic is good. And it and and I don't know if I agree with that.
I think of
Uh um
Too often.
We humans get trapped in in kind of words and things that are
Black and white, or the this or the that's the right.
So
You can
Create the veneer the appearance of authenticity.
Right, which is very important. It's a very important quality in the public eye.
It doesn't mean that you're completely faking it.
It just means
That there is something about you that's natural that you that is very powerful about you.
But you're a conscious of it. You're not just operating, you know.
Without thinking about it. You're conscious of what makes you look authentic.
And you kind of up it and you kind of
lean into it and you kind of create it.
Okay, and then maybe in four or five years.
It's a different mask or a different form of authenticity that you have.
But it doesn't mean that it's completely fake.
So I think it's important.
for a politician, for an entertainer, for anybody in the public eye.
to create the appearance of authenticity.
That they're not somebody fake, that they're not saying things
Just for attention that they actually believe it.
But you have to be aware that that's the game that you're playing.
People who aren't aware of the game that they're playing have no control over themselves.
They will say stupid things. They will be authentic.
When it's no lo when they're
When they're authentic.
Character is no longer interesting.
Right? Because tastes change.
And maybe right now.
Kind of um
Saying what you think about certain things is cool.
But in three years it won't be cool and you'll look stupid.
So you have to be aware of who you are.
And you have to adapt to the times.
And you have to kind of
Play a middle game.
Where you know the importance of appearing authentic.
And and playing that game.
But you're also aware of it and you can consciously control it.
Yeah.
You have a few of these quotes.
That are so good. I just want you to unpack them. So I kinda wanna read you
something that stood out to me that resonated and just hear you kind of riff on it.
Um and maybe where that comes from or where you think that
that needs to be applied or like if you could shake somebody get them to sort of hear this message.
You know what's that?
Uh

You talked about how
Being timid is very dangerous.
And you basically said, um
You know, don't take action when you have hesitation or doubt. It infects your execution. And the quote was timidity is dangerous. Be better to enter with boldness.
Any mistakes.
You commit through audacity are easily corrected with more audacity.
Everyone admires the bold.
No one honors the timid.
It's a very important quote for me because um timidity is is to me one of the worst sins that I think
People have.
Right. And it's what
Yeah.
causing you to not be successful in life.
Right.
Boldness is the most important quality that you can develop.
And first of all, get rid of this misconception that some people are born bold and others are born timid.
When we're a child we're bold as hell.
All children are born bold, right?
They know what they want, they scream, they yell, they get their parents to do things. The parents are their slaves, essentially.
Children are born bold. You become timid. It becomes a habit.
You become afraid, you become deferential, you're always saying yes, you're always trying to please people.
It becomes your face just becomes like that and you lose a sense
Of that boldness that you once had.
And the the
The main thing around that idea is that
People are assessing you.
In these kind of nonverbal ways, they're reading your body language.
And when they can sense
That you don't have confidence.
That you're doubtful.
That you're hesitant?
They don't want to join you. They don't want to be part of your team. They don't want to listen to you.
They tune you out, they don't respect you.
Okay.
So if you start something, a project, a business
You're not quite sure of it.
That kind of radiates outward. That spirit of your hesitation, people can feel it.
It has a
Equality.

That repulses people.
They don't want to join you.
But if you
Sho boldness and confidence, even if it's not real, you fake it.
Even if you make yourself believe that you're confident and bold.
It excites people. We want to be around people like that.
I know when I wrote the fiftieth law.
And I first met fifty cent.
I was amazed by how confident this guy was.
And it made me feel ashamed that I'm not as as confident as he is, that I was even a little bit timid.
It excited me and it excited everyone around him. They wanted to be part of his team. They wanted because it fed off of him.
We all want to be infected by the energy
Of someone who's bold.
Who knows what they want?
Right.
So that's the main thing is
Your first impressions are critical, and if people see you as timid and differential and all closed and not so certain
They're gonna run away from you. They're uh unconsciously, they're not gonna want to
Be part of your team.
Well the one of the best parts about this is there's so many levels to this. So when I tweeted this quote out
Uh Darmesh, who's the you know
co founder of a twenty, thirty billion dollar company, retweeted and says, This is exactly what I needed to hear today. Yeah, that's crazy. I saw that. I thought that was We just did a podcast, um with this guy, Hayes Barnard. He's probably, I don't know, one of the
Top thousand wealthiest people in the world.
And we it we wanted to do this podcast. And most people when they come on the podcast
They might agree to do it.
And then we sort of badger them to be like, Hey, would you um
You know, can we get on a call, maybe talk a little beforehand, or hey, we've got some ideas about what we might talk about. You know, you you've published so much work that it's we know where to we know where your thoughts are already. But for people who don't publish, like
you kinda want to find what are your big ideas.
And um
Most people
put in you know very little effort. He was the exact this guy Hayes was the exact opposite. He takes a ton of action. He calls, he's got his own brainstorm, he's decided if I'm going to enter this, if I'm gonna do this, it doesn't matter if it's just a
P uh p two hour podcast recording.
Like I'm gonna try to do this as best as this can be done.
And so he was like going full force and he said, Come out.
And hang out with me for the day.
Come do my morning routine.
Let's hang out all day. And then we'll he's like, Well, it's he's like, I do this thing in the middle of like Tahoe. I go, I do a breath work, I jump in the ocean, I jump in the lake.
It's cold.
Um, I watch the sunrise and he goes, I'm on such a high. I'm in such a peak mental state. He's like, I think if we do the podcast right after that.
It'll be the best podcast we could we could possibly do.
So I go out there and I do I spend all day this guy and he's so bold, meaning
The way he just approaches life is super bold. Even w after we do the breath work and stuff, he's like, You know what?
Every day I heard your sp the one a great quote, Do something new every day. It marks the day. Uh it keeps you growing, keeps you fresh, keeps you alive.
You know what I've never done? I've never swam to those rocks out there. Let's try to swim to those rocks.
And so we jump in the water, we try to swim the rocks, and I'm just around this guy.
And I ask him about Elon Musk, because he worked with Elon.
For about ten years.
And he talks about Elon the way I talk about him. He goes, I go, Tell me you know, describe Elon in a word, he goes
The ultimate alpha.
And hi'cause Elon, I would say, is probably the b biggest um
example of boldness and all and like
The solution to making a mistake through audacity is more audacity.
I think he is the the number one on earth uh out of eight billion people at doing that.
And um
seeing that this guy was around him and had the same impression

He thought he was timid.
Once he saw you know the the level that Elon played at.
Um, I just w there's so many levels to this.
Yeah, I mean um
We're infected by the energy of the people around us.
Right. And we can we pick up things
We we're too attuned to words and and and we don't realize that we're actually
There's an animal part of our nature.
And that animal part of our nature.
is picking up the energy, the signs that we can read and and how people in the tone and their voice
In how they stand in their posture.
And when we when we feel somebody who's confident
It kind of rubs off on us. We wanna be around it and we want more of it, right?
I have a chapter in the Forty Eight Laws of Power called Infection.
And the opposite happens.
Were people who are
overly dramatic or kind of drama drama queens.
We're always
have some terrible thing happening to them. They're always the victim. And they just, you know, and they they sort of suck you into their drama and they can destroy your life.
We're infected by the energy of the people around us. That's the most important takeaway that I would give here.
When you're seeing what's going on right now.
um on social media or whatever.
It's it's kinda fun after reading your books because I'm like, Oh, that's interesting.
There's that thing. There's that thing.
Is there anyone out there who uh
You
Not exactly look up to, but you're like, Oh, they are
playing the power game like
Textbook perfect.
Uh, it's a good question, but I don't really think I can answer it because
The problem is
That you do need time to just to see what people are truly like.
You know?
So I remember um
Some twenty five years ago or twenty four years ago I met a man named Dove Charney.
Who ended up um
becoming the founder of the company American Apparel.
I met him when he was just starting out.
And man, that guy was charisma.
In a bar he was in cr insane level of confidence.
Right, he was incredible.
And he built this factory, this vertically um organized factory in Los Angeles.
He created an incr an empire.
American apparel.
And I thought he was brilliant and he got me to join the board of directors. I was on the board of directors for American Apparel for several years.
Until it ended.
But then over the time
We realize this guy has incredible flaws.
Right.
He doesn't have self control.
He seems confident that
But in the end he was making some really bad decisions because he wasn't flexible.
So
You know, I can say
Uh you know, certain artists
who are able to sort of stay on top of their game.
Seem to me
To be kind of power players because they know how to mix things up. And I mentioned someone like Beyonce, I'd say somebody like 50 Cent, I'd say people like Jay Z.
These are people who understand the attention game, how to play it, and that's a very important part of the forty eight laws of power.
Appearance is how you appear.
But with politicians I will not go anywhere near that because we have no way of knowing.
We have no way of seeing in the present moment. I see
I see so many stupid people out there.
who immediately react to something in the news and make their judgment about this was great or that was stupid.
I'm sorry, you have no idea.
In two years we will know if it was great or if it was stupid.
And in twenty years we'll even have a better idea, and in two hundred years we'll even know for certain, right?
So I can't even go near judging about political figures.
Entertainers I can see I think we have some some value there, some metrics.
Um, and in sports, obviously we do.
But um who who are some of those folks?
Well
Yeah, um
I'm being a little bit selfish here, but I'm friends with um
A head coach of the NBA.
Mark Dagano.
Who's the coach of the Oklahoma City Thunder, and they just won the NBA championship.
I knew him.
Eight years ago.
When he was the coach of the G League team of the Oklahoma City Thunder.
And this guy
Is absolutely brilliant.
At the game.
Um
Power.
And it it's not like he's Machiavellian, not at all. He's a great leader.
But
He understands
There's not there's no more difficult job in the world than being an NBA coach.
You have twelve or fifteen people with these incredible egos who all think they're the greatest, right? And you have to build them into a team, into a spirit that's one.
It's unified.
That wants to play the game right.
He understands perfectly human nature and psychology.
And he built himself from the ground up as as a coach of the G League.
And then he started off as the coach of the Thunder and they were very bad the first couple of years.
But he was very patient, he had a goal in mind.
I tell people
You know
We're so distracted, we're so confused in the social media world that we can't think.
Let alone
Three months ahead.
But even try to think a year or five years ahead.
Like a plan.
Right.
My God, I can't think that far ahead.
But it's powerful.
When you have a plan that goes two years, three years down the road.
It gives you a sense of control, like
This is what I want. This is what's important. This feeds my overall goal. This is irrelevant.
It doesn't mean you're inflexible.
It just means that you have a direction.
And people don't have direction these days.
This man had direction. He had a plan. He knew exactly how he was gonna lead his team and
to a championship. Of course he couldn't predict everything.
Who you draft, et cetera.
But
To me, the way he ate man he manufactured this recent championship is one of the most brilliant examples of the forty eight laws of power. I'm not gonna take credit for it.
By any means.
But he's a figure on there.
Who's gonna be a coach to reckon with for the next ten, twenty years.
He's the Phil Jacks of our era. He's somebody I would point out. And Phil Jackson.
was somebody that I greatly admired who was definitely
a man of power because he understood
human nature and psychology.
All right, listen, the two most beautiful words in the English language.
Our email subscribers. You need more email subscribers, I guarantee it. I don't care how many you have, you need more of them. I need more of them, you need more of them, we all need more email subscribers because email
is an amazing way to build your business, to build an audience, and to build a direct relationship that's not dependent on
TikTok algorithm, the Instagram algorithm. It's how you get people to engage directly with you so you can get them to trust you, to like you, click your products, uh, check them out, check out your stuff.
That's how you build a relationship with people. And so email subscribers are key and they're free. It's an amazing tool. And the tool I use for my email subscriber base is Beehive.
It's a tool that was built by the folks who were actually running Morning Brew. So they were running growth at Morning Brew.
They grew it to four million subscribers.
And along the way, they had to build out all these special tools in-house that made Morning Brew great. It helped it grow faster, helped it make more money, helped it uh nurture the email subscribers. And so they took all those tools that they built internally and they said,
Could we provide those as a separate
Star up.
for anybody to use and not just Morning Group. And so that's they made it available to everybody. Because before Beehive, you were duct taping five different apps together. Google Docs, MailChimp, Stripe, a spreadsheet and your dream. It was all bundled together. Well now
Beehive is just one tool that does it.
And it's a single purpose thing. It's what I use for my newsletter. I send a newsletter out to over a hundred thousand people and that's what I use. And so for listeners of My First Millionaire, I should do in a special code. So if you're thinking about, hey, I should have a newsletter, I should have subscribers. I kinda wanna build an audience that way.
Well check it out.
Uh they'll give you 30% off. Use the code MFM30. Go to beehive.com. That's B-E-E.
H I V dot com.
And use the code MFM thirty. I'll put the link in the description to make it easy for you. Start scaling your content today.
I want to ask you about fifty cent.
Because um when somebody said, Yeah, you wrote a book with fifty cent
I hadn't actually I hadn't read the fifty fiftieth law, so I don't know that book.
Uh to literally I learned about that book today.
It's awesome. It looks like it's got like gold pages. It looks like a Bible. I bought like the the faux leather cover one just now and I'm like excited to get it.
But the funny thing is
You and fifty cent.
I mean I couldn't think of two more opposite
people culturally. It's like you know like I look at your room and I look at where you are and I'm just like okay th you're basically like
What I think of when I think of an author.
And then fifty cent has this incredible story, you know, coming up from the streets and getting shot and becoming a hip hop icon and then like a business guy and whatever.
So um I'm just curious, like h uh A, how did that come about? And B
You said he was incredibly. Can you tell any specific stories about like
Either
One of two things. Your impressions when you met him and like what stood out to you about this guy.'Cause you you know, he you said you're infected by the energy of the people around you. Like tell me I would love a specific story.
Yeah.
Where do you think most people don't actually really appreciate fifty's story or you know, what what actually he's done. You know, people have a very surface level understanding of him as like, Oh, he's just some rapper guy.
Well I mean
First of all you have to understand
his his story a little bit. I mean a lot of people know it, but um
You know, he was his mother died when he was like eight or nine years old.
She was a hustler herself.
And so he was raised by his grandparents.
He grew up on the streets of Southside Queens.
And he was a drug dealer. He was a hustler. He drunk crack and he talks about it in his
His really great autobiography from Pieces to Wait. I highly recommend that book.
Okay.
But how many people from that background?
ended up being who he was, being this successful, this multi millionaire. I maybe I don't need he's not a billionaire but
Incredibly successful, right?
Nobody.
So something.
about him is different. Something about him
Is very exciting and very interesting.
Okay.
So that alone tells you something.
is unique about about fifty.
And so
When I met him, you know
I was a little bit intimidated because
I'm I'm reach out to you.
Or you to him. Yes, his his literary agent reached out to me.
And set up a meeting in New York.
in in the back room of a steakhouse on Madison Avenue, right?
It's like a scene out of The Godfather or something.
And so you know, you can see on this kind of
Thin, slightly nerdy white guy.
And you know, he's surrounded with his
Possige.
He's both and these
A little bit intimidated. I was kind of intimidated.
But then I learned later on
That he was sort of intimidated by me.
Because he thought this he was meeting
the forty eight laws of power guy, the sort of Henry Kissinger type.
And he was a little bit uh intimidated as well.
But what impressed me most about him was that he was very calm. He has this very calm energy.
So people think of him as being really out there and angry, thuggish.
But that's not who he is. He's a very calm person.
He's always
Seeking to be in control of a situation. He wants power. And you don't get power by being out there being yelling and being angry.
And being thuggish.
So I was very impressed.
He's very he's actually
A very interesting thinker.
And so
In America.
Everything is so divided. Everything is just so conventional and boring. It just drives me crazy.
Like
A book between a a nerdy white guy, Jewish white guy from Los Angeles
And this
Rapper from South Side Queens.
That's a really odd mix. That's exactly why you do something like that. To bring two people who are strange, who are very weird. It's not a normal combination.
Bring them together, something interesting can happen.
So
Yeah, I was with him for about six months and I witnessed some some very interesting things. I remember
He was on a phone call.
In in in one of his uh offices.
Doors were closed, it's just him and I, but he was on a call.
With um
A a a female celebrity whose name I will not mention.
I was going to
Man, this guy is a seducer.
He is really good at it.
Right.
You know.
His voice and what he was saying to her and how he was making her laugh.
He was seducing me. It was incredible, right? This guy's got skills in the art of seduction. I could see that right away.
I remember once you're going to
It was in like August.
I can't remember what year, like two thousand six or so.
He was about to draw up a a record.
Yeah they h they
dropped a single that he had done with Robin Thick. We're going way back here.
And it got leaked onto the internet.
And Chris Lighty, who was his manager at the time.
was furious because they had a whole marketing plan.
Laid out.
for the roll out of the song and then it got leaked to the internet. It just completely ruined their whole marketing.
Everybody was freaking out. They were so upset and angry. What do we do? We're gonna take a lawsuit, we're gonna bring them to court, we're gonna get them to take it off the internet.
I was in there in the room when fifty got the news.
Once again he was so calm, he was like Buddha.
And he goes, No, man, this is the best thing that ever happened to us. Here's what we're gonna do. We're gonna go with it. We're not gonna fight it.
We're gonna create a story.
They created their own story.
We're not gonna try and
And repress it. We're gonna create our own version of what happened.
And here's what I'm gonna do.
We're gonna create this story that fifty cent freaked out and was so angry and up so upset.
He took the big screen TV off the off the wall and he broke it on the ground. He was so angry. He took his cell phone and he threw it at somebody.
She said, blood's gonna roll, heads are gonna roll. This is what we're gonna do.
Right.
It was total theatrical. He never it was none of it ever happened. He got his team to take the big screen

And smash it. And they would film it, you know, as if he had done this.
And that was the story now. Instead of fifty reacting and getting all upset.
Which made him look weak.
He turned it around and made it
About him and his anger.
And that's what only the only thing people could talk about on the internet.
Well that was brilliant, right?
Instead of freaking out
He was calm.
He thought of
The internet is all about attention, it's all about creating stories.
I'm gonna take control of this and I'm gonna create my own story.
And I was I was absolutely amazed, you know, that that that to me was
The forty eight laws of power and action.
I mean, I had so many stories with him that you know, it was probably one of the most fun
Elements of my life, you know.
Going to parties with him, going to the award ceremony in Vegas.
Meeting Floyd Mayweather Junior, going to his house in Connecticut.
It was a tr it was like a drug trip. It was amazing. I have lots of stories, but that gives you an idea.
Your life's so fascinating because like you know.
Tupac was interested in Machiavelli and then you four eight Laws of Power came along and that's like the new version of Machiavelli. I originally
saw Forty Eight Laws of Power because I don't even know if it was true, but there was like a rumor I saw on the internet that
There's this book.
That is banned in prisons.
Because it's so powerful and all depends on And I was like I don't I don't know if that's true, but like you I'm hooked.
I mean, well if it's bad for prison it it must be the best.
And then you're huge in the hip hop community and black community. And I was like this is
I'm I'm I'm in again. I love this. I wanna read what these guys are all about. And so it you must have had a really exciting life because
you are not a person who I would think would be buddies with fifty or wh whoever else you're friends with, and yet
You have the best of type of fame where like these
guys who normal people admire, they're those guys admire you. Even the billionaires, the athletes, all the successful people admire you. So you you must have met so many awesome people.
Uh I've met a lot of awesome people and um
You know, I must say I'm I'm very, very grateful for my life. It's been a blessing.
Because I struggled for so many years.
I know what it's like to struggle in life. I know what it's like.
To have no success. It came very late for me.
So um
Having it at my age when I was basically thirty nine
Forty almost.
Was very meaningful, so I don't take any of it for granted.
And I remember
I I was when I wrote the Forty Eight Laws of Power, I was living in this crappy one bedroom apartment in Santa Monica. I mean it was
You're by the ocean, so you can't complain, but it was a really kind of small, cramped little apartment because I, as I said, I had no success.
I wrote the Forty Eight Laws of Power in that apartment.
And then suddenly
You know, I'm I'm on
Television things are happening. Okay, it's a little bit weird.
But then I was invited to Italy.
In early
Like four or five months after it came out,'cause it came out in Italian.
You know, the land of Machiavelli.
And
I'm invited to go give this kind of conference.
And suddenly this guy is whisking me around to meet all these celebrities, and we're on the island of Capri.
And paparazzi are following me and taking pictures of me.
А на гетиметні екс примістер.
Of of Italy, who was a very famous person there named Andreotti.
since passed away.
The most
Machiavelli, an Italian politician of the modern era. I'm sitting in his office I'm interviewing.
You're men.
My life right now.
Just five months ago it was nothing, and now I'm doing this.
It was almost too hard to believe. So
I take none of it for granted. It's it's been
It's been an incredible ride and I'm I'm I'm very grateful.
What triggered the transformation in you?
Most people don't have this sort of career renaissance.
where you figure it out and you s put it together and you start suddenly
You go from a a sort of non descript.
um you know situation to to suddenly you're in this guy's office in Italy in in the island of Capri. You know, uh w what triggered the transformation in you at age
thirty seven thirty eight.
Well, uh a bit of luck. Um so I you know
I had spent all of these years
I wasn't a loser. I worked
at Esquire Magazine in New York. I had jobs in journalism.
I lived in New York for several years. I worked you know, I had jobs.
I lived in Europe and I wandered around. I you know, but I was always writing and trying to figure life out.
I never gave up on myself.
I learned different skills at writing.
I also had lots of shit jobs with very bad bosses.
So
When I was thirty five years old, I was in Italy.
Um, on a project that I won't even discuss. It was so stupid.
I met
A man there.
Who's there for the same
Project.
Who is a book packager.
And um we were both really unhappy with what we were doing there. We were walking in Venice, Italy.
And he's Dutch and he asked me
If I had an idea for a book.
And
That was the turning point in my life to put it down into one.
Like second of time.
That exact moment.
In Venice, Italy.
Yeah.
July of
Nineteen ninety five.
He asked me that question.
Yeah.
Everything clicked. I s I improvised.
What would turn into the forty eight laws of power?
All of my bad jobs, all of my horrible bosses with their egos and their political games, all the crap that I had dealt with in Hollywood'cause I had worked in Hollywood for years.
Just came flowing out of me almost like I was vomiting. And I said
You know?
Power, the book about power, how timeless it is.
In the time of Louis the Fourteenth, if you made a mistake, you were put in prison and you were executed.
Now
If you make a mistake, the same mistake, you're fired. It's the same game, you're just not as bloody.
Right, and I told them a story.
About Louis the Fourteenth and his finance minister, the opening story of the forty eight laws of power.
He got very excited and he goes
This will be a great book.
I will pay you.
To write
A treatment for it and then we'll try and sell it.
And
I was so desperate. I was so hungry. I was so depressed.
And I came back to Los Angeles.
I actually borrowed money from my parents so I could
I could afford
try and write this dream because he's actually offering money once.
He had the treatment.
I was so desperate and so depressed.
That I put
Every goddamn

All of my bad experiences like
Everything that I had been through, all the skills I had developed, I just poured into that treatment.
It was literally get rich or die trying at that moment.
And I wrote a great treatment. He loved it and
The rest is history.
So part of it was luck.
I hadn't met this man.
I wouldn't be here talking with you.
But part of it was
I never gave up.
And I had spent those
sixteen, eighteen years in the wilderness developing skills.
So that's what helped turn it around.
That's so awesome.
And I think I've read that um.
I don't know how many books you've sold in general of all of your books, of your seven or eight books, but I think I read
the the Four Eight Laws of Power came out in two thousand or ninety eight. I think it's accelerated, right? So it
Isn't it selling more this year or last year than it did
early on.
Uh I'd say twenty twenty four.
Was
Best year we've ever had.
It's insane.
It's accelerated, yeah, and I think we're now
Close to ten million copies sold in the United States alone. Oh my God.
It's pretty crazy to have like a life's work.
Right. I mean that's like like I don't know if if you meant to do this, but like you've it it's a timeless thing that can be
Readable and awesome for fifty or a hundred years.
Yeah, I mean um
You know, you never know when you write a book like that.
It's a very weird book.
And that could be good or it could be bad.
It looked strange.
You know, the design of it with the things on the side and everything broken up.
It has all these stories from history.
For better or for worse, I can say nobody else has written a book that looks like that or reads like that.
Right. And it could have easily failed. It could have easily bombed.
I you know, I remember God, am I gonna have to go back to
to working at some crap job after this book is a disaster.
Uh yeah, maybe. Maybe you'll have to like
Go back to
Doing temp work or something.
So it could have easily
Been a disaster.
But it didn't.
And so um it's one of those strange things. It's very
A lot of it's luck, but all of it also it's
How much effort I put into the work.
To make it
Kind of this timeless thing.
So um
Yeah, it's
It's it's insane because
You never know in life what's gonna be successful or what's not.
I wanted to ask you about daily application of of the ideas from Forty Eight Laws of Power.
Because it's one thing to read a book.
To nod along. Maybe even underline it.
And then you close the book and you go back to being exactly the person who you are, which would be, I think, a pretty disappointing outcome.
And I think about these day to day situations I get in. I'm
in my car, I'm in traffic, I'm in a grocery store, I'm at a coffee shop. I'm
having a a a un just yet another meeting at work, whatever it is.
I'm curious, what's one
Law that you think is
Easily applicable to people's day to day life.
to their normal routines of their life.
that they could kind of mark in their mind, like, Oh, he mentioned that situation.
Let me approach it differently, using what he's
Using one of Robert's sort of
Laws of human nature and laws of of of of power.
Okay, well the the try this is
To um get out of the moment.
And to be observing a s the situation that's in front of you.
So so often
You're just reacting to things. You're just in the moment. You're just listening to what people are saying.
You're just in your own head, your own thoughts.
Your own ideas that circle around and round and round, your own emotions you but you
When you
happen to you in the morning, you're not listening.
And I want

And pay deep attention.
And not to listen to yourself at all to cut that off completely.
And to absorb your s your interest, your mind, your spirit.
in the people you're dealing with.
This pertains to power, this pertains to seduction, this pertains to strategy, this pertains to war, uh and to human nature, to all of my books, right?
You're too self absorbed.
So even when you go to Starbucks and you're getting your coffee,
You're thinking about your own problems, you're thinking about how much
Prices.
For coffee's going up.
Okay, no what you do is
You look at that barista.
And you go
What is it like to be him or her?
What is their world like?
You know?
That's kind of weird that you know probably
I say it's a it's a guy, it's probably this is not his life.
Task.
What's going on in his mind in this moment?
Try and read his body language.
And go into this
almost like fant story in your head of
What he's like.
What his apartment looks like.
What his girlfriend looks like, what his dog looks like, and think about it.
Get out of yourself.
Okay.
Do that again and again and again and again in every situation.
It will calm you down. It will be a form of therapy for you.
Will also make you a superior observer of people.
Still make you a superior observer of human nature?
It will make you understand.
The people say
that they love your ideas, but their body language actually reveals that they're not interested at all.
You'll become a superior reader of people.
And you won't be so self absorbed, right?
That is the number one skill you can develop is to get outside of yourself.
And to be a a supreme acute observer of people.
Sam, you ever done an like that?
I think I'm a very emotional person.
And I get upset. But like, for example, the other day I got a ticket, like a parking ticket, and I caught the guy giving me the ticket. And so I had like this interaction and like
I was like
I wanna yell at you, I wanna do this, I wanna do that. And I was like Wait, hold on.
I gotta think about I gotta reflect what does what does this guy wanna be doing with his time right now, and how do I use
My
insight into his perspective to get out of the situation, as opposed to saying
You suck. You're this is go solve a real crime, whatever. And so but I think um
R but related to that, the the thing before you have to do that is to control your emotions, which I work hard and I fail at all the time.
But
That that's what it's kind of rooted in, I think. That's like the foundational like step, which is like don't react.
Reflect.
The other side of it is that um
The guy who's giving you your parking ticket.
No.
He's got his own life, he's got his own world. Yeah, it's annoying as hell.
You feel so helpful so stupid why you have
You're right there, but he's still gonna write the ticket. You know, why couldn't he wait like three minutes? Oh no, it's already written he can't
Can't go back.
But
The people you deal with
are interesting. They're weird. They're different. They have their own life. They have the he's
He's this poor schlub who's got this miserable job. Everybody hates him.
Like you do.
He's gotta receive all of this hate.
and negative energy from people, then he has to go back.
To his apartment.
Somewhere in Queens.
And you know, and and other people are kind of
You know, yelling at him, he's got all this internalized anguish and anxiety.
Get into the story of other people because they're interesting. They're weird. I know I'm making this up.
I never met this guy giving you the ticket or if it's a woman.
But
It's fun to think about it, it's fun to get out of it, it's fun to imagine what they're like.
And then you slowly start developing this muscle.
Where you start thinking about other people and not yourself.
And getting into their stories.
And figuring out what makes them tick.
So if you need to seduce them, if you need
To get this guy giving you a ticket to not give you a ticket.
You have the way to do it because you understand who he is. You understand how much negative attention this guy gets every single day.
He's out on his job.
And your first reaction will be
Man, that must be a terrible job. I'm so sorry for you say something that kind of disarms him.
Well, maybe now you have the power to get him to stop riding that ticket.
Or as opposed to your aggressive energy.
Fuck, man, I do, but that every single person gives that to me. I'm not gonna still ri I'm gonna still write your ticket just to spite you, you a hole.
No, you defuse the situation
By coming up to him with like
Man, you must have a horrible job. I'm really sorry that you
I don't know, whatever it is.
You know, that's the approach.
Well, have you ever read uh Chris Voss's book, Never Split the Difference? Like if there was any takeaway, it's basically uh so Chris Voss was like a FBI negotiator and he teaches people how to negotiate.
And like the main thing that he teaches is exactly what you said, which is don't react to what you hear. Put yourself in their shoes and actually verbalize and label how they feel. And that's an immediate disarming thing.
Two
Get what you want, basically.
And Sean, I don't know, uh, you know, like me and Sean have both talked about the book The Game, which I I I assume you you know all about Neil Strauss.
Um and
For a four year old boy, that was like the greatest thing ever.
Because we like desperately wanted to meet girls and it was like a very pop
pop, um poppy way of like learning about it. It was like easy to learn.
And read about but you have a book I
Is it
I have to remember the numbers. Thirty three rules of seduction, is that it? No, it's called the art of seduction.
Art of Seduction, thirty three Laws of War. Uh I I'm I'm getting'em a bunch of I'm getting them confused. But you have a whole book on seduction.
Which like I wish I would have read this when I was younger because like you outline like all these interesting ways basically seduction not meaning just sleep with people, but like
seduce someone into like
Basically doing what you want them to do.
And it gives like actually amaz it gives like uh your books, Sean hi uh Robert's books are pretty great. They like tell you the history, but then they also the history of like a person who's a story of this rule.
But then you outline like the tactics and strategy, which is like the best format. And so um that w that was another winner and it taught all these like tactics on like seducing people or getting them to like buy into your
whatever you want them to be up by yeah. I mean I I I know Neil Strauss and I w you know he talked m he quotes the art of seduction in the game.
Um
But
The art of seduction's different it's not a book for pickup artists.
It's a book for making people fall in love with you.
It's a book for making people interested in you. It makes a book
It's a book for people.
Who who you want to like
Fund your project.
Or who will you want to hire you?
It also is something that you maybe want to seduce.
A woman or a man for for sex or whatever, yes.
But seduction is something that you do every single day of your life.
Right.
bad at it or you're good at it, but you're always constantly having to make people like you in some way or other.
So I wanted to come up with the
Ultimate psychology.

P what draws people to you and what repulses people from you. So sort of that's what the artist deduction is about.
Did it make you more likable?
Were you uh were were pre and post. Yeah, it was pre and post, uh, Robert.
Different.
I uh
I got interested in seduction in the eighties when I well, obviously I was a young man.
Um, you know, and
I was living in Paris.
I was twenty two, I was working in a hotel in Paris.
We're all the models.
Stayed.
For the for the fash weeks or whatever.
most beautiful women in the world were staying at this hotel at twenty two years old.
You know.
Ca.
It was insane.
And there was this guy who would come by
It was like shooting fish in a barrel. He knew that these were all these incredibly beautiful women were.
He was this tall, good looking Brazilian guy.
He was so good at the seduction game, I was fascinated by it.
How come he could get all of these women to go out with him on dates and I couldn't do anything? I couldn't get anywhere.
I kind of got interested in it.
And then I started
Reading books, literature about it, and I kind of got fascinated.
By the whole
phenomenon of seduction.
And I went through my twenties.
What I would call my years as a rake.
Where I was
You know, I was
fairly successful at meeting and seducing women, not on his level, not on fifty cents level.
But on my own level I was
Pretty good at the game.
Um and so
I was fascinated by years before I wrote the book.
And then when I have the chance to write it.
Yeah, all of my
all of that knowledge and experience came into into writing the book. Some of my own failures and some of my own successes.
So it's been something that had been on my mind for many, many years.
In general, how
Self actualized do you feel like you are in these different
Book categories. Power.
Seduction, et cetera.
Like are you if a ten is kind of like what you think is
somebody who's sort of maximally doing these things, maybe the best examples of people you've you've met or or or have read about.
Where do you put yourself and and is book writing an effective way to move up that ladder? You know what I mean? Does did the study and the process of writing it actually help?
Well, a a writer is a writer. I'm not out there uh running for political office. I'm not, you know, uh on a stage entertaining people. I'm a writer.
Okay, so you judge me.
By that barometer and not by other things.
And um I talk about I think about like Machiavelli himself.
He was this
Mid level diplomat.
In in Florence.
in it the early part of the sixteenth century.
He was not successful, he was not powerful.
You came from the middle classes.
And then um he aligned himself with the Republic of Florence.
And then when the Medici came back into power.
He was in disgrace and he was in he was in prison briefly.
And he went off into the countryside.
And to get himself back in power, he wrote a book called The Prince.
Right.
This was going to r ingratiate himself with the Medici's
And maybe get him so he could come back and be a diplomat again.
Okay.
That one book that he wrote.
Some hundred pages long.
Can you you cannot quantify
The influence.
That that one book has had.
Right.
It's insane.
I mean
Maybe next to the Bible.
You can't think of another book that has had greater impact.
All of the historical figures since Machiavelli who read The Prince and
Who internalized the lessons.
Who loved him or hated him or reacted against him or for him?
If you had to measure that power, it's insane. It's off the charts.
And yet he never made any money from it. He never realized that power.
But that
is true power true influence in the world
So we can look at all the
People.
Around us who would
Uh we imagine as having power.
With all their money and their billions.
But ideas are the most powerful thing in this world.
Okay.
You can
Put all you want price tags on on on material things.

Completely immaterial.
An idea.
Is what is most powerful in this world.
So when somebody has an idea for a great business
Where Steve Jobs has an idea.
For a new iPod?
It's in his head, it's in his brain, he's thinking.
And then it becomes reality.
That is power, the power of thinking of ideas.
is greater than all the other nonsense in this world.
So I can't dunk a basketball unlike Sam.
I I can't dance very well at all.
I can't sing. I have a stroke, so my body is kind of
Messed up right now.
But on the level of ideas
I have tremendous amount of power and influence.
And I and I know it because of people writing to me.
I'm not bragging at all.
It's just very real.
So on that barometer
I have actualized it.
It's not whether I can go out there
And command an army.
Or become president,'cause that's not my game. My game is ideas.
And on that level I have actualized myself. I have realized
My life's task and my power.
And after I die?
I'm not gonna be like Machiavelli with
is six hundred years of influence.
But I will have some influence over people after I die.
That is power. That is ideas.
Ideas shape this world.
And I people have lost that kind of lesson. They're so into material things that they don't understand.
The spiritual
Intellectual power of thinking.
Which can change this world.
That's a good ass answer.
That was a great that was a great. Do you do you have your one liner of your life's task? I'm just curious.
Yeah, to change to change people, to change how they think and to change how people act. That's always been my
My goal here.
You know, um
There's too much.
Kind of
Stupidity. There's too much kind of
People who don't understand themselves, who don't understand power.
I'm not saying I'm superior in that game.
Because believe me.
I've made many, many mistakes.
Never outsine the master.
I violated that law at least.
Two times, maybe even three times.
I'm a flawed human being, so
I'm not the epitome of the forty eight laws of power.
But I've witnessed people being so stupid.
Being so single minded, being so inflexible, so unable to adapt.
That it infuriates me.
That they don't understand.
how to actually operate in this world.
So I'm
Trying.
My books.
My life's task.
Is to enlighten people on that front.
Are you a happy person?
Like um because when I whenever I read your books, it's a very serious topic and you spend your life reading and writing about very serious things.
Does are you able to find joy in that and be happy?
Well
You know, happiness is is is just a word and um
You know, we live in our bodies and ourselves and our emotions.
And
You know?
At some hour in the morning I'll be very happy and excited.
And then
Two hours later something will f be frustrating and so we all go up and down and up and down.
But I'd like to talk about fulfillment as opposed to happiness.
A sense that I fulfilled
You know, I have a sense of fulfillment that I accomplished something.
And I have a very high sense of fulfillment.
So right now I'm writing a book. It's very frustrating.
I can't type because I had a stroke.
I can't take hikes. I'm my life is very limited right now.
But I get to write this book.
And it involves so much tedium and so much difficulty.
But then I pull back and I go, wow, man.
What a privilege that this is.
And this is a book I hope that's gonna change people on a very deep level.
So
On the micro level of happiness.
I have a lot of frustration, I have a lot of tedium, I have a lot of things that I wish were otherwise.
But on the level of happin of fulfillment when you pull back
Over a course of months or years?
It's off the charts. I I have an incredible sense of accomplishment.
Particularly this book here.
The book on the supply.
Been working on it for six years.
You have no idea the things I've had to overcome to write this book.
Right.
Physically the challenges have been insane.
As I said, I can't type.
I have to handwrything.
I have to edit in handwriting.
It's a mess.
And then I have to dictate it in the computer, then I have to edit it with one hand.
I can't take a hike to
Clear my mind, I'm just trapped in my body in my office.
And yet I've written the book.
And so
I'm gonna feel so
proud of that, what I had to overcome.
That
To me that's more important than happiness, you know, that sense'cause it's very
It's something we
Happiness comes and goes, but a sense of fulfillment it just sort of stays with you for a long time.
You've had um
such a huge impact on me. Um you know, when I was in my twenties and to this day still, um you've had a really big impact on me. So I'm personally very like honored and thankful to be able to talk to you. But the
predominantly the people who listen to this are are young men in their twenties and I hope that we've kind of been the gateway drug for that because
We have a lot of awesome people on here, but not everyone is um
necessarily wise or intentional, which I think you have that in space. I think that's kinda your thing, which is you're you seem very intentional, very wise and very calm. And I find that to be uh uh an
It kind of infects me a little bit and and rubs off on me. So we appreciate you doing this. You're um
You're awesome. Hopefully
You know, y I think you've you said your goal was to change people, you've changed me, and hopefully this is a gateway drug to introduce you to even more uh people who you could pot potentially change. I appreciate that. You know, I I I don't take it for granted being invited to these podcasts. I know sometimes that can be a little bit difficult because
My schedule's a little bit.
A full
But I I'm very grateful to have audiences like this, you know. So
Thank you so much for for allowing me to do this.
Right allowing me to
To just blow hot air for an hour and a half.
I mean look at this.
This is you're in the business of ideas and info. I mean, this is I'm on the podcast. I'm I'm supposed to be
Talking, I'm supposed to be paying attention.
And I'm sitting here furiously writing notes to myself of s small nuggets of wisdom. Little little golden nuggets that you were dropping. So thank you for coming on. Thank you so much for having me.
Thank you, that's it. That's the pod.
I feel like I can rule the world of no way
be what I want to
I'm putting my law in it like a day's off. On the roadless travel, never looking back. My friends, if you like MFM, then you're gonna like the following podcast. It's called Billion Dollar Moves. And of course, it's brought to you by the HubSpot Podcast Network.
The number one audio destination for business professionals. Billion dollar moves. It's hosted by Sarah Chen Spelling. Sarah is a venture capitalist and strategist, and with billion dollar moves, she wants to look at unicorn founders and funders, and she looks for what she calls the unexpected.
leader. Many of them were underestimated long before they became huge and successful and iconic. She does it with unfiltered conversations about success, failure, fear, courage, and all that great stuff. So again, if you like my first million
Check out billion dollar moves. It's brought to you by the Hub Spot Podcast Network. Again.
Billion dollar moves. All right, back to the episode.